About
Richard D. Phipps

ARTIST STATEMENT:

"For me painting is trying to make real the impossibility of making matter into images aimed beyond its own materialism. It’s an act of faith. Like life, it’s a process of change: if you don’t know where you’re going, you likely will get to somewhere else, that moment of recognition when the work is complete. 

I prefer abstract terms that make direct the contemplation of sheer appearance of things apart from practical purpose; to experience seeing without distraction of naming; a liberation of perception. What a viewer may get from my work does not require explanation. Flaubert says: “art is not technology and cannot be ‘mastered’, it is an endless access to revelatory states of mind”. I agree."

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BIOGRAPHY:

Born in 1939 in Los Angeles and raised in San Gabriel, CA., Richard’s first art classes were at the Pasadena Museum, now the Pacific-Asia Museum. In 1957, he was enrolled at UCSB with a double major in English and art planning a career in advertising. He was studying Life Drawing with Howard Warshaw and Watercolor with William Dole. At age 18 he was employed by Walt Disney Productions as a caricature artist in Tomorrowland at Disneyland 3 years after the park  opened.

 

The next year, while an undergraduate, he worked as Studio Artist at KEY-TV in Santa Barbara designing and building sets for live black and white broadcast of opera segments for Dr. Herbert Graf, Director of the Metropolitan Opera of New York City. Richard worked as Production Assistant with Aldous Huxley on remote live broadcast of Huxley’s lectures. At 19 he was Continuity Director writing ads for everything from Rolls Royce sedans to refrigerators for live broadcast.

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In 1959 Richard went to NYC and interviewed at Benton & Bowles Madison Ave. agency and at Esquire magazine. At Martha Jackson Gallery he saw Jackson Pollock’s last works. Then, at the Museum of Modern Art, he saw more Pollock paintings, and then, Picasso’s “Guernica” which he studied intently for its powerful drawing and innovative use of tonal palette. He decided against a career in advertising, returned to CA. and drove a meat truck to earn enough to travel in Europe for a year.

 

In the cold winter of 1960-61 he stayed 5 months in Spain in a small settlement outside of Alicante amid remnants of Phoenician, Greek, Carthaginian, Roman, Visigoth, and Muslim Moorish occupiers. At the Prado Museum in Madrid, the power and resilience of the Spanish masters in contrast to the corruption of Francisco Franco’s fascist regime awakened an appreciation for the layers and densities of cultural expression possible in art. It remains intrinsic, below the surface, in Richard’s work today.

 

He returned to complete undergraduate degree  work at UCSB, majoring in art and drawing from life with Warshaw and Rico Lebrun. On leave in January, 1962, Richard enlisted for military service and was stationed at Fort Sill, OK, serving in the Army Artillery in field operations as an intelligence analyst during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Released from Active Duty, he returned to UCSB, won a Ford Foundation E.I.P.C. Scholarship and a full tuition scholarship to the Yale University Summer School of Art at Norfolk, CN. There he worked with Gabor Peterdi in printmaking, Bernard Chaet in drawing, and in painting with Ilya Bolotowski and Milton Resnick. That year, 1963, at the California State Fair and Exposition, Richard was awarded First Place in Printmaking and the overall First Place Student cash award. He graduated from UCSB with a B.A. degree with Honors. Later, in 1968, he earned an MFA degree, writing an original Masters Thesis on the expressive use of color.

 

In 1964 he had decided against graduate school and instead went to travel in Mexico and Guatemala. After studying Orozco’s murals in Guadalajara, he established residence and studio in the 300 year old village of Marfil de las Minas west of the city of Guanajuato and set about learning to paint. He met and worked with the American expatriate painter, John Nevin, a Dadaist and associate of Max Ernst.

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He made color compositions in watercolor for which he hired a master weaver to execute in thick-spun wool, dyed with experimental mixtures of aniline dyes, woven in traditional Mexican Tapete 2m X 1m format, inspired by Mayan color palettes in Guatemala. These were shown in Los Angeles in the inaugural exhibition of the Egg and the Eye Gallery, now the Craft Museum, on his return and enrollment at UCLA  Graduate School of Art in 1965. He met and befriended L.A. artists Arlene and Max Hendler,  Charles Garabedian, and Louie Lunetta.

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Richard worked as a foundryman for George Goyer, Rico Lebrun’s former studio assistant, casting Lebrun’s late sculptures in bronze. He executed a permanent garden waterfall installation commissioned by Guy J. Logan in north San Gabriel. He had begun to show his work in juried and invitational exhibitions when he accepted an offer to teach drawing and painting at UCSB and moved from Ocean Park in Santa Monica to Montecito where he built a large painting studio. He began what would be a 56 year part-time career instructing fine art courses at university and college levels.  In 1988 he re-located from Santa Barbara to Los Osos, CA, and with the artist Tika Solnar established  their home and studios there. They were married in 1997 and shared a creative life for 27 years before Tika Solnar Phipps passed in 2023. Richard had retired from teaching in 2022 and he continues painting at his studio in the Baywood Park district of Los Osos.